Appraising Delegitimization: A Forensic Linguistic Analysis of Attitude and Graduation in a Viral Pancasila Citizenship-Symbol Case on Indonesian Instagram (2021)

Abstract

This study examined how evaluative language was used to delegitimize a national ideological symbol in a viral Indonesian social media case. In January 2021, a video circulated on Instagram in which a woman from Karawang Regency, West Java, publicly declared that Pancasila, Indonesia's state ideology, was “sampah” (garbage) and “layak diinjak-injak” (deserving to be trampled) while holding up a Civic Education (Pendidikan Kewarganegaraan) textbook bearing the Garuda Pancasila emblem. The case attracted national media attention, led to the speaker's arrest by the Karawang Regional Police, and prompted a subsequent psychiatric evaluation. This study applied Appraisal Theory, a framework situated within Systemic Functional Linguistics, to analyze the Attitude, Graduation, and Engagement resources realized in the speaker's verbatim utterance, as documented and triangulated across multiple independently published national news transcriptions. A qualitative, single-case forensic linguistic design was adopted, treating the documented utterance as linguistic evidence subject to systematic discourse analysis rather than impressionistic reading. The analysis found that the utterance combined explicit negative Appreciation (valuing Pancasila as “sampah” and “kotoran”) with a hybridized Judgement of propriety (“layak diinjak-injak”), intensified through lexical repetition and delivered as a bare, unhedged, monoglossic assertion. These findings corroborated prior appraisal-based accounts of Indonesian digital discourse, which identified repetition as a culturally salient Graduation strategy, while extending the scope of Appraisal Theory's target categories from interpersonal attacks on public figures to the institutional-symbolic delegitimization of a state ideology. The study offers a linguistically grounded method for describing evaluative intensity in state-symbol-insult cases and discusses its implications for forensic linguistic practice, Pancasila-based citizenship education, and the evidentiary use of language analysis under Indonesia's Electronic Information and Transactions Law and Law No. 24 of 2009.